What is particularly weird about this is that the "fork" (god I hate that word in the general case) mechanism should really be inferred, not explicit: the entir

What is particularly weird about this is that the "fork" (god I hate that word in the general case) mechanism should really be inferred, not explicit: the entire point of a distributed revision control system is that you are able to willy-nilly push and pull from random compatible commit graphs, a feature people who really "work with git" use constantly (like, that isn't somehow esoteric: this is how it is used by the Linux kernel people) in order to quickly merge work from various parties... what does it even mean to claim you are a fork of one, specific other prior repository?